Tim L. Adsit - Achieving Success for Kids. A Plan for Returning to Core Values, Beliefs, and Principles

Tim L. Adsit has excelled as a change agent throughout his career to date and served as a professional executive administrator in school districts that value visionary leadership and continuous improvement in student learning and achievement.

Tim is uniquely qualified to write this book by a record of successful and progressively responsible service in the positions of superintendent; director of curriculum, instruction, school improvement, assessment, personnel services, rural schools, interim special education, and grant writing; management consultant; elementary and secondary principal; high school, middle school, and elementary school teacher; private Christian school executive administrator and principal; college graduate teaching assistant; and adjunct summer visiting professor. These roles illustrate the ability to play a dynamic leadership role in the field of education. He possesses a broad knowledge of all phases of educational administration and brings diverse, demonstrated, successful experience ranging from public and private school districts as small as 60 students to as large as 12,500 students. He also has had experience serving as superintendent and principal in one of the largest public boarding schools in the nation.

More recently, he has started two small businesses of his own, which you can get more detailed information about at www.tlawinc.vpweb.com and www.nexusinc.vpweb.com if you are interested.

Tim received his M.Ed. and B.S. in education from Oregon State University and did post-graduate work in educational administration at the University of Oregon. He also received his Doctor of Divinity in December of 2009 from Cambridge Theological Seminary. Tim and his wife, Maggie, reside in Bend, Oregon. Should you wish to contact the author, you may reach him at timads@ bendbroadband.com or call his office at 1-541-383-5119.

Achieving Success for Kids

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Education
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.rowmaneducation.com

Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

Copyright 2011 by Tim L. Adsit

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adsit, Tim L., 1948

Achieving success for kids : a plan for returning to core values, beliefs, and principles / Tim Adsit.

p. cm.

Summary: Achieving Success for Kids is a clarion call to action and explains why we need to save Americas children and return our nation and our schools to the core values, beliefs, and principles upon which our nation was founded. Tim L. Adsit presents a visionary blueprint for change and success in achieving and exceeding international standards in American schoolsProvided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-61048-590-6 (hardback)ISBN 978-1-61048-591-3 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-61048-592-0 (electronic)

1. Public schoolsUnited States. 2. Educational changeUnited States.
3. EducationAims and objectivesUnited States. 4. ValuesStudy and teachingUnited States. I. Title.

LA217.2.A28 2011

371.010973dc23

2011025884

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

If we ever forget that we are a nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

President Ronald Reagan

This book is dedicated to God, to the story of Gideon found in the Bible, to saving Americas children, to returning our nation and our schools to the core values, beliefs, and principles upon which our nation was founded. The place where world change begins is America, and, as Mohandas Gandhi said, We have to be the change we wish to see in the world.

America must be a country that is committed to creative collaboration and networking if it is to survive, thrive, and ride the wave of the future. America must go beyond the realm of assumptive thinking and welcome and embrace the dawn of innovation (and change) because there is nothing more empowering than an idea whose time has come. (paraphrased from a Successories wall poster, Successories, Inc., 2000)

Since Tim Adsit released advanced copies of Achieving Success for Americas Kids in April 2011, the word has spread, and he has been deluged with requests for the book once it is published by Rowman and Littlefield Education.

Advanced copies have been requested by business leaders and labor representatives; family and community members; parents, grandparents, and guardians with kids still in school, ESD and Boces superintendents, local school board members and school administrators, school site councils, teachers from across the nation; local, county, and state government officials; and governors, state superintendents of public instruction, state and federal legislators, and candidates for the upcoming 2012 elections.

Editorials praising the books frankness and refreshing, no-nonsense clarity, simplicity, good sense, usefulness, provocativeness, patriotic overtones, self-critical assessment of the state of Americas educational system from a former public school teacher and administrator, and clarion call to action to achieve international standards in Americas schools are sure to follow.

Teachers have told the author that the book should be studied by every present and future member of the teaching profession.

Unlike most education research and many reports, Achieving Success for Americas Kids was addressed to the American people and appeals to them to take action. It provides accurate and actionable information about a strategic plan that works and that will help all public or private American schools reach or exceed international standards in two to four years, and it does so in a form that is accessible to all education system stakeholders.

The book contains and links the reader to some of the best research about what works when it comes to educating kids. The information in this book is a distillation of a large body of scholarly research in the field of education.

Principals, master teachers on special assignment, team leaders, professors, and department heads anticipate using Achieving Success for Americas Kids for staff development and courses they teach.

It is anticipated that school boards across the nation spurred to action by the contents of the book will promulgate policies to fully implement its recommendations. It is also anticipated that national educational labs will develop workshops to train school personnel to use Achieving Success for Americas Kids with administrators, teachers, and parents.

Clearly, the American people know a good thing when they see it, and the author is heartened by that. But even though the preliminary response has been overwhelmingly positive, Tim is sure that there will be critics. They may complain that Achieving Success for Americas Kids tells only part of the story; that its real purpose is to divert attention from the federal education budget; that it just rehashes old research that everybody already knows; that it is written by an evangelical Christian, fiscal and political conservative, who is only interested in getting a particular candidate elected in the 2012 presidential election; and that it only helps white, middle-class kids.